“Ha, ha.” I perched on the end of his bed, dripping rainwater onto his comforter as I wished for my punching pillow. Alas, as luck would have it, there was nothing in the room I could hit without breaking my promise to Parker. Marc sat against the headboard, facing me. He took one look at the grip I had on his comforter and tossed me one of his pil ows.

That smal act floored me.

Marc was hurt, humiliated, and pissed off. He was madder at me than I’d ever seen him, and he was scared of losing me to either the council or to Andrew. And on top of that, he felt mortified by what he apparently saw as the ultimate act of cuckolding. Yet he knew what I needed and provided me with it without a moment’s hesitation, or probably even a conscious thought.

Marc was always there for me, even when he was packing his bags to leave me. He deserved to hear the truth from me, but what he deserved even more was not to have to hear it.

“If you’ll promise to listen until I’m done, I’ll promise not to leave anything out. But please don’t go before I’m finished, because I don’t want to wonder later whether you left me because of what you heard, or because of what you didn’t hear.”

He tilted his head and watched me through eyes narrowed in suspicion and dread. “Does that mean there’s more to the story than your making Andrew into a stray in some sort of furry freak-fest? If so, you should feel free to leave out the nonpertinent details.”

I smiled a little at that. I couldn’t help it. “Um, yeah. There’s a little more to it than that. And yet a lot less to it than that. There was no furry freak-fest, Marc. Just normal, even average sex.”

Oddly enough, he seemed pleased to hear me describe sex with someone else as “average,” and I wasn’t complaining. Whatever made him more open to listening was fine with me.

“Talk. I might as well know what everyone else is going to be whispering about.” He pulled both of his legs onto the bed and sat cross-legged, looking amazingly vulnerable for a man of his bulk.

Marc’s new defenseless posture did little to make me want to spil my guts. Spew them, maybe. But I’d promised to explain, and I wasn’t going to pass up the chance.

“I was in human form when I bit Andrew,” I said, pulling my feet up to mimic his pose. “My teeth must have partial y Shifted at the…um, height of things. It couldn’t have been much of a Shift, because there was no pain that I remember, and I didn’t notice anything different.”

Embarrassed, I glanced at the pillow in my lap and discovered that I’d twisted it into little more than an amorphous bag of feathers. “Well, there was no pain for me, anyway. Andrew yelped as if I’d bitten his ear off, but I barely drew blood. Just a couple of drops.”

Marc frowned. “So you did break the skin?”

“Yeah.”

His arm moved faster than my eyes could follow, and another feather pillow smashed into the window before falling to rest against the broken suitcase. Good thing that wasn’t a brick, I thought, absurdly.

“How could you even think about sleeping with a human?” Marc demanded, and I tore my gaze from the pil ow reluctantly and turned back to face him. “There’s a reason we have the rules we have, and apparently you’re it.”

I stared at him openmouthed, waiting for him to realize he’d misspoken. My irritation grew with every second that passed without a retraction. “We don’t have any rules against sleeping with humans,” I said, my teeth clenched hard enough to make my jaw ache. “The guys do it all the time. Most of them lost count of the notches on their belts long ago. Hell, Ethan doesn’t even bother to learn their names anymore.” I threw the pillow at him, and he caught it in one fist. “But when I finally get a life of my own—and keep in mind the fact that this was a mutually monogamous relationship—everyone acts like I’ve committed a cardinal sin.”

With every word I spoke, my pitch rose a little, until by the time I finished, I was screaming at him, standing on my knees on the end of his bed.

“The problem isn’t that you’ve been dating humans, Faythe,” he said, tossing the pillow aside. “It’s that you’ve been infecting them.”

Only one of them, I thought, but I knew better than to say it aloud.

“How was I supposed to know that was even possible?” I shouted, backing off his bed and onto the floor. “None of the guys ever infected anyone in human form, so how was I supposed to know I could?”

“That’s not the same, Faythe. You know human women can’t be infected.”

As a matter of fact, I did not know that for certain, and neither did he.

But that was another argument entirely.

“I didn’t know about the partial Shift, Marc. I had no idea this could happen. If I had, I would never have gone near Andrew, or anyone else, for that matter.”

“Wel , it’s too late for regrets now,” Marc said, his arms spread to either side of his torso. “In case you don’t remember, since you seem to think you’re above the council’s laws, creating a stray is a capital crime.

The council’s going to want your life for this. And they’re going to want me to bring it to them. So you tell me how the fuck I’m supposed to deal with that.”

Chapter Twenty-one

So that’s what was wrong with Marc. He thought he was going to have to kil me.

Well, clearly that wasn’t the only thing bothering him, but we’d finally gotten down to the part he couldn’t get over.